We moved 3 years ago and gutted the kitchen -- this is the third kitchen I have designed. This time I went with Shaker cabinets. The last 2 kitchens had a trash compactor, but the bags got pretty heavy and we could not handle them any more so we put in drawers that hold cans for the recycle and the garbage. I put long, metal handles (horizontal on the drawers and vertical on the doors) and so far the cupboards have not gotten messy. I only have 2 lower cabinets and all the rest are drawers of various widths and depths -- this is the second house I have done this and I am sooo glad that I no longer have to crawl into the bottom cupboard. The original kitchen was very small, but there was a place for a table adjacent so I extended the kitchen into that area so I could get a decent size kitchen. I put a bar that we can eat at. We put in a smallish pantry -- it is much smaller than the one we had in our last house, but there really is no room for a bigger one. The kitchen is next to the garage and I had hopes of putting in a laundry room there but I haven't felt up to doing more remodeling so I have a large plastic garbage can in the garage that contains my mops and brooms. I, too, am lucky, DH says that since I do the cooking I can design the kitchen. He also lets me do the bathrooms (we had to gut them too -- the house had major issues with all the mechanicals because it had been remodeled by numerous handymen over the years and once you got under the skin of the house everything that was not original was bad).